![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
orange_smaugI get the feeling my flist isn't much for console RPGs, but I loved this game so much I had to get all tl;dr about it anyway.
I suppose it sort of fails as a pimp post, considering people who haven't played it can't read it for fear of spoilers but they're what make it so awesome~ ars;dklfjlkw. Well, if you have a Gamecube/Wii but haven't heard of these games, they're probably best known for their unusual battle system (well, the first one is probably also known for its notoriously bad voice acting), usually called a card-battling game but it really isn't (in the usual Yu-Gi-Oh and various TCGs sense), it just uses cards as the interface between player and world, with attacks being cards representing weapons, defense as cards representing armor and shields, healing items as cards representing food, etc. You start out with a certain hand of cards with each card being replaced as it is used or discarded, and play the cards in ascending order (according to their number in the bottom right hand order), with consecutive strings of cards and other special combinations of attack and special cards doing more damage to the enemy. That's really just a really quick and dirty description of it but anything more thorough would probably be better just looked up in a guide. The character models are all right, but the backgrounds are hand-painted and absolutely gorgeous, while the music is good in the prequel and absolutely phenomenal in the first game.
And if you have played the first one but didn't like the battle system (which was original but had its flaws) or the story (which has some neat twists but is otherwise pretty pedestrian, I admit) this prequel really overhauls it and you can see how much thought went in to improving upon both these and other facets of the game. And though I did't really count the voice acting in the original a negative, horrendous as it is, because it crosses over in to so-bad-it's-hilarious territory and you can turn it off anyway, the voices in Origins are not only much better, but even generally excellent when most people would have been fine with serviceable. Really, I still don't know how it could have scored lower than the first one across the board unless the reviewers couldn't figure out the battle system or hadn't actually played the game (which is a possibility, sadly).
WARNING: Major spoilers for both games and the actual tl;dr under the cut.
While I liked the first game enough on its own merits to play through it multiple times, what impresses me most about the prequel is just how much it improved upon the first one. This is one prequel that you really can't accuse as being more of the same. For example, the Magnus Mixing and Ex-Combos are very much a refined and improved version of the Magnus Special Comboes from the first game. You don't have to sit in battle waiting for the right cards to come up, trying to keep an enemy alive until they finally show up, just pop the magnus in the mixer and do a few rounds in the Coliseum. Though you might not get the right cards for an ex-combo right away, it's much easier to get the hands you need because you can discards many more cards at once this time around, and can shrink your deck so that the needed cards cycle through much more often. And while you don't know all of the possibile combinations right off the bat, you can find at least some of the recipes during the course of the game and can buy Ex-Combo recipes from the Coliseum. Even if you don't buy them, you eventually work out that there's sort of a system for them like [Mix of finishers] vs. True [Mix of finishers] and having Milly uses her specials usually results in some sort of combo, so it's less of a crapshoot all around. There's also the heartwing dash to make walking and climbing stairs faster, non-aging battle magnus so you don't find out that your healing items rotted right when you could have used some heavy duty healing, the fact that you get eight empty magnus right off the bat and end up with three times more than you had in the first game, not requiring you to go to cathedral flowers to level up anymore, and just a hundred little conveniences that make the whole game a smoother experience overall.
Though like I said, not everything is an improvement, and the feeling you get from opening chests or completing sidequests is less satisfying this time around. Because the battle system uses the same attack items for all the characters except for the finishers, the items you mainly got were equips, defense, and finishers. Equips didn't show up much, and completing sidequests usually resulted in me getting another one round defense item I wouldn't use or yet another copy of a finisher I already had, which meant I felt less motivated to complete them this time, though the sidequest log was a welcome edition. Something that could have improved this, I think, would be to have a greater variety of healing items, full party healing items especially. They could also have given us more wacky attack items, like the 'Charred Fish' or 'Coins of the Styx' from the first one. They could have 1-3 numbers so that we could use them in the place of the weak/medium/strong attacks, and so that something else besides equips could give status effects to the enemy. And where the hell did my Sort:Found option go?!
Barring that though, the deck organization and the battle system in the second one is so much more streamlined and fast-paced. Attack animations were shorter and lead in to each other much more smoothly, and when paired with the pseudo-ATB system made battles go by much more quickly, as one character could act while you were still picking cards for another. I loved having a different deck for each situation (though like I said Sort:Found would have been nice, and maybe an option to add a newly found card to every deck), and it was awesome not having to try and fill out the max number of cards in the deck if you didn't want to have Pass cards in there. I watched my sister play some of the first one again a recently, and nearly cried seeing all those hands of greyed out defense cards you couldn't discard; getting rid of shuffling and allowing you to discard multiple cards were very much needed elements, and even if they hadn't overhauled the battle system just implementing those options would have improved the first one a lot. The second game is also much harder than the first, healing you between battles is really a courtesy the game kindly allows you because you need it, it's not uncommon to get in the red or even die from common enemies if you have the wrong deck out. Which just means the bosses are correspondingly harder, of course; no guesses on how many times I died against a certain boss, though I'll say that my eyes popped out of my head when I saw their stats in the Field Guide (also a wonderful addition to the game). By the way, the 'Try Again' option is one of the best things go come out of the JRPG genre in some time, all games should have that option so that you don't have to sit through cutscenes again and again when trying to beat a particularly evil boss.
Music is also one of the few areas that wasn't improved upon in comparison to the first game. It's not to say that it's bad by any stretch of the imagination, just not as good as the phenomenal soundtrack of its predecessor. I liked most of the battle themes, but there just aren't as many in the prequel; it fits for all of the Afterling fights to have the same music (Poacher, which I really like) I guess, but more variety would have been nice. There were also too many low, militaristic brassy pieces, which makes sense in that you spend so much time on Alfard in this game, but they tend to run together after a while. And while I loved the use of electric guitar in the first one, Sakuraba goes way overboard with it in quite a few of the pieces. He seemed to use less restraint this time, which doesn't work out so well for some of the new themes--like Chaotic Dance 2, which I still like because it's Punk-Kid-Giacomo's theme, but Chaotic Dance is definitely better. That said, there are a few pieces from the second game that I actually like more. The Komo Mai theme (Heaven Sea Flower Temple vs. The Hall of All Creation) is one of them, which I thought had a rather overbearing violin in the original, and is performed much more delicately the second time around. I also like the main battle music, Valedictory Elegy more than True Mirror, which is ironic because the orchestral version of True Mirror is my absolute favorite piece of music from both games.
Not only is it a fantastic arrangement on its own merits, it's also the music for an amazing battle, my absolute favorite because of the immense emotional pay off it provides for someone who has played the first game. The setting, first of all, is very different from that of other boss battles in the game. Many battles happen at night or in dark places, but even those that happen during daytime have environments made up of blues, greens, browns, purples, darker colors, maybe with storm clouds rolling in overhead. Here though, the room is all shining gold (Standard Alfard design, but you've never fought in a place where it's been emphasized like this before) and the sky you can see through the windows behind the characters is the blue and white of a perfect, sunny day. Then the music kicks in, and you realize it's your theme. It's technically the main battle theme from the first game but it's what plays when you--the main character--fight, and furthermore, I believe the fight against Kalas has the guitar version of True Mirror as the music. The piece itself also played during the last Giacomo-Ayme-Folon fight so it's not solely 'your' theme, but it does highlight which battles are more important to the story. So the choice of music is already atypical, and when Baelheit attacks...you realize his specials are the spirit finishers from the first game, right down to the accompanying phrases.
When combined with the plot revelations dumped on you beforehand, the result is really something else. Daimon is basically you from the first game, and Baelheit is who Kalas almost was. In fact, though he had some pretty messed up views and went about implementing them in entirely the wrong way, Baelheit's motives were actually more noble than Kalas's, in that he didn't do what he did for entirely selfish reasons. And when Daimon stopped advising Baelheit because he had gone too far down the wrong path Baelheit still looked to Daimon for guidance though he couldn't hear her anymore, but Kalas actually went as far as to knock out and erase his guardian spirit's memories when they disagreed. And when combined with the game's statement that spiriters and their guardians have the power to sway the fate of the world...in the first game Kalas tried to override his spirit but was eventually helped by it to save the world after he had sense knocked back in to him, while in this one Baelheit did sway the fate of the world--by helping to turn it in to a world that needed saving in the first place.
Which brings me to the next subject, that even the writing is better in this game. It's not perfect of course and has a not insignificant number of cliches or ham-fisted portions, but the game is much more self-aware this time around and also has much improved dialogue that helps even minor NPCs feel much more alive. Combined with voice acting that is not only much better than the first one's (which isn't hard, granted) but actually good, and you get a game where it's much easier to feel for the characters. Not only did Rodolfo get actual development in this game, he's also one of the few characters where the accent is distinctly non-Japanese but (unlike One Piece's horrible dub) actually fits the character. I also want Lolo and the Sfida Attendant to get to gether and have a gaggle of mechanically inclined, obnoxiously perky kids :D. And how could I fail to mention that the main character's biological mother is actually named, and though she's still threatened to motivate the character she manages to make it to the end of the game alive and mostly intact! Amazing.
You get fewer party members in this game, but they all receive much more development in return, and all three felt essential to the plot in a way that some of the characters in the previous game didn't. Sagi is much more likeable than Kalas, and while I didn't dislike Kalas in the first game I felt much less like I was being an asshole in purpose by agreeing with Sagi so that I'd get better cards during battle. I'm very impressed by his characterization actually, he's not only not eternally emowangsty but also manages to pull himself out of the few times he was justified for feeling down, and is usually fairly good-natured without being teeth-grindingly cheerful or shounen heroish. Milly is also so much more awesome than Xelha--and as with Kalas though I also don't really mind Xelha's characterization it's nothing special, while with Milly instead of another typical mage-type mysterious girl linked to an ancient civilization character, you get a female character with the highest physical defense in the game and uses giant maces to beat people's faces in. And how could I forget Guillo? He's not only the actual mage-like party member, but also a thousand-year-old transexual puppet with a crush on Sagi who likes to make snarky comments about his love rivals and inappropriate animal analogies about everything else :D.
His interaction with Milly is awesome and hilarious, which just reminds me that another thing this game is better about is the humor. The sequence with the Lord of the Lava Caves made me laugh hard enough to put down my controller, but besides that also showcases another instance where Milly certainly isn't the typical RPG heroine, with her sleeping through classes and inelegant angry stomping. Though Sagi's voice acting is pretty good it doesn't match up to Guillo and Milly's, which are both excellent and just made their interaction even better. The minor characters also have more character and are more amusing this time around. The Diadem characters were the best I thought, seeing Ladekahn and Gibari as snot nosed brats was great--especially their last segment in the Cloud Passage--helped along by Palolo and kid!Gibari's awesome voice-acting (once again, so much improved over the first game). The letters were also a fantastic idea, I loved the junk mail and Tik's adventures in learning how to write--and on a more serious note, kid!Savyna's letters to you were certainly unsettling, and how weird but awesome is it that Guillo is who she modeled herself after?--but the best use of the letters was definitely Giacomo. His role this time around is as the villain who's always dogging your trail and whenever he catches up just never manages to quite beat you, a character type well known to JRPGs. The game is very aware of this though and plays it up for max hilarity with Giacomo's character design and dialogue, even having him send you petulant letters railing at your superiority after every battle, shouting 'I'll get you next time Sagi!!!11' and he's practically your penpal, it's awesome XD.
The characterization of the enemies also had something approaching nuance this time around (or at least compared to most videogames), which the first game tried for in some cases but didn't quite achieve. Opinions may vary but I thought the portrayal of Geldoblame was actually quite sympathetic--he originally truly did only want peace and security for everyone else, until he was stabbed in the back and abandoned by his hero. He was also aware of how the rest of the world might look dimly upon his relationship with Verus, which you can figure out by inspecting items just as in the first game. However, in contrast to the first game, I really didn't expect the game to actually explicitly spell it out at the end, and so give him a reason for being the way he is in the first game while at the same time putting the blame for that on Verus's actions and not on Geldoblame having 'deviant' urges in the first place, just his taking the wrong path in dealing with the betrayal. It did a lot to assuage my annoyance at homosexuality seemingly once again being a character trait only given to villains, I'll tell you that, even if some 'good' homosexual characters would have been even better. As in the last game, one member of the enemy Trio is much more developed than the other two--and how awesome is it that Valara's definitely the head of the group, not only the biggest damage dealer but also the highest ranking soldier of the three and the most important to the story--but the letters Heughes and Nasca send to each other flesh out their characters much more than what little development Ayme and Folon had at all, as does the option to let them go for the better ending, which still gets you some cheesy enemy-who-is-now-reluctantly-your-ally scenes, but they're much better justified this time around.
Then there's the reversal of Baelheit and Verus in their roles, a fairly common plot twist in videogames but done better here than in most, as it's actually hinted at throughout the game and becomes very obvious in retrospect, but the writers also don't mess up by making Verus too suspicious. I've already rambled endlessly on how much I love the fight with Baelheit and his part in the story, but when you find out that not only did Verus fake the guardian spirit but also his injuries, and that he's probably Sagi's dad with poor Gena (not explicitly stated but there if you want to find out, the game can sometimes be very ham-fisted about certain plot points but other times it's great at subtly giving you details about the story, Shanath being another example of this) and purposely had him selected for the experiments, Verus is really the only character in the game that comes off as entirely unsympathetic. Depending on if you fought Wiseman or not I suppose he could count too, but even he differs from Verus in his portrayal as merely otherworldly and alien in his thinking, while Verus's brand of evil is entirely Grade A human assholishness.
The plot is also better written and more interesting, in my opinion. Though I thought the game went overboard with the number of unbeatable battles, it was interesting playing a game where the main character lost so many times in the service of the plot instead of winning just because he's the main character. The overall story is also much more about politics and intrigue and how history is created than Chosen Ones and finding magical doodads to save the world. And I really love how just as the first game takes advantage of the interaction between player and game to create one of the few legitimate uses of amnesia in videogames in recent memory, the second game uses the knowledge players take from the first game to set up certain expectations only to methodically knock them all down. You go in thinking you're playing the part of a guardian spirit again, but you aren't and you eventually realize, as I mentioned before, that you play the enemy from the first game and the role of your enemy's guardian spirit actually matches your role in the first game much better, and the 'Chosen One' of this game is part of why the events of the first game are set in motion. I almost wish Baelheit actually had been the final boss because it would have been so fitting as the culmination of your experiences when both games are taken together, though Verus as the final boss does fit better for the game when taken alone.
I haven't talked about the origins of Malpercio yet, have I? God that was awesome, it was pretty well foreshadowed but still well hidden enough that it could come as a surprise if you weren't paying attention. I had occasionally entertained the idea but only started seriously considering it when the Dark Brethren told Seph 'one body is not enough' and I thought 'Wait a minute, didn't they say Malpercio was made from the parts of five gods in the first game?' And the Children of the Earth, mystical heroes from the first game helping you seal away an ancient evil, but in this game it was because of their mistake that the wrong people were taken down (whether it was right for Malpercio to resort to asking the Dark Brethren for power and to kill those people or not, the real troublemakers weren't them but Wiseman and the Dark Brethren), that the problem wasn't really solved, and that the idea of using the End Magnus and Malpercio's remains for evil purposes could have happened. It's a great twist that really plays on history and how it can be misunderstood and distorted. Also, it would have been awesome to get a fully animated opening like in the first game, but it's still great to sit down and watch it after beating the game and finally understand what's going on, and finally realize that you're seeing 'yourself'.
And oh man that ending (except for the silly 'Never let go!' part): Sagi and Milly as Melodia's parents (Okay, so crazy hair colors sometimes do serve a purpose), Milly in Melodia's future room presumably snarking back and forth with Guillo's head...it's sort of happy (until Geldoblame's last scene at least) in that all the party members make it out alive, even Guillo, but it's tempered by the knowledge of just what goes down in the first game and that the peace is only a temporary one. And it's something that's easily missed--I missed their hideout in the desert myself, actually--but the sidequest with Georg and Larikush sort of implies that Sagi and Milly (and Guillo XD) are also Kalas's parents in a sense, if the description I found for the final form of the heart flask is true. Just, grargh, it's sort of creepy and depressing but still very cool plotwise.
As a final note, I suppose Hassaleh in the first game is supposed to be like Mira in this one, there but not important to the story so the characters never actually visit it. I would have liked the game to be a little more explicit on that point, but at least they sort of gave it precedence by referring to Mira but never letting you see it during this game.
Anyone who liked the first one should buy and devour this game immediately. And even if you didn't like the first one the prequel is such a huge improvement over it that I'd recommend it on its own merits anyway as it can be played as a stand alone game (though you really get the most out of it from playing the first then Origins).
Yes, I really did write 3,681 words about a videogame. Uh, I really like it? Yeah ♥.
I suppose it sort of fails as a pimp post, considering people who haven't played it can't read it for fear of spoilers but they're what make it so awesome~ ars;dklfjlkw. Well, if you have a Gamecube/Wii but haven't heard of these games, they're probably best known for their unusual battle system (well, the first one is probably also known for its notoriously bad voice acting), usually called a card-battling game but it really isn't (in the usual Yu-Gi-Oh and various TCGs sense), it just uses cards as the interface between player and world, with attacks being cards representing weapons, defense as cards representing armor and shields, healing items as cards representing food, etc. You start out with a certain hand of cards with each card being replaced as it is used or discarded, and play the cards in ascending order (according to their number in the bottom right hand order), with consecutive strings of cards and other special combinations of attack and special cards doing more damage to the enemy. That's really just a really quick and dirty description of it but anything more thorough would probably be better just looked up in a guide. The character models are all right, but the backgrounds are hand-painted and absolutely gorgeous, while the music is good in the prequel and absolutely phenomenal in the first game.
And if you have played the first one but didn't like the battle system (which was original but had its flaws) or the story (which has some neat twists but is otherwise pretty pedestrian, I admit) this prequel really overhauls it and you can see how much thought went in to improving upon both these and other facets of the game. And though I did't really count the voice acting in the original a negative, horrendous as it is, because it crosses over in to so-bad-it's-hilarious territory and you can turn it off anyway, the voices in Origins are not only much better, but even generally excellent when most people would have been fine with serviceable. Really, I still don't know how it could have scored lower than the first one across the board unless the reviewers couldn't figure out the battle system or hadn't actually played the game (which is a possibility, sadly).
WARNING: Major spoilers for both games and the actual tl;dr under the cut.
While I liked the first game enough on its own merits to play through it multiple times, what impresses me most about the prequel is just how much it improved upon the first one. This is one prequel that you really can't accuse as being more of the same. For example, the Magnus Mixing and Ex-Combos are very much a refined and improved version of the Magnus Special Comboes from the first game. You don't have to sit in battle waiting for the right cards to come up, trying to keep an enemy alive until they finally show up, just pop the magnus in the mixer and do a few rounds in the Coliseum. Though you might not get the right cards for an ex-combo right away, it's much easier to get the hands you need because you can discards many more cards at once this time around, and can shrink your deck so that the needed cards cycle through much more often. And while you don't know all of the possibile combinations right off the bat, you can find at least some of the recipes during the course of the game and can buy Ex-Combo recipes from the Coliseum. Even if you don't buy them, you eventually work out that there's sort of a system for them like [Mix of finishers] vs. True [Mix of finishers] and having Milly uses her specials usually results in some sort of combo, so it's less of a crapshoot all around. There's also the heartwing dash to make walking and climbing stairs faster, non-aging battle magnus so you don't find out that your healing items rotted right when you could have used some heavy duty healing, the fact that you get eight empty magnus right off the bat and end up with three times more than you had in the first game, not requiring you to go to cathedral flowers to level up anymore, and just a hundred little conveniences that make the whole game a smoother experience overall.
Though like I said, not everything is an improvement, and the feeling you get from opening chests or completing sidequests is less satisfying this time around. Because the battle system uses the same attack items for all the characters except for the finishers, the items you mainly got were equips, defense, and finishers. Equips didn't show up much, and completing sidequests usually resulted in me getting another one round defense item I wouldn't use or yet another copy of a finisher I already had, which meant I felt less motivated to complete them this time, though the sidequest log was a welcome edition. Something that could have improved this, I think, would be to have a greater variety of healing items, full party healing items especially. They could also have given us more wacky attack items, like the 'Charred Fish' or 'Coins of the Styx' from the first one. They could have 1-3 numbers so that we could use them in the place of the weak/medium/strong attacks, and so that something else besides equips could give status effects to the enemy. And where the hell did my Sort:Found option go?!
Barring that though, the deck organization and the battle system in the second one is so much more streamlined and fast-paced. Attack animations were shorter and lead in to each other much more smoothly, and when paired with the pseudo-ATB system made battles go by much more quickly, as one character could act while you were still picking cards for another. I loved having a different deck for each situation (though like I said Sort:Found would have been nice, and maybe an option to add a newly found card to every deck), and it was awesome not having to try and fill out the max number of cards in the deck if you didn't want to have Pass cards in there. I watched my sister play some of the first one again a recently, and nearly cried seeing all those hands of greyed out defense cards you couldn't discard; getting rid of shuffling and allowing you to discard multiple cards were very much needed elements, and even if they hadn't overhauled the battle system just implementing those options would have improved the first one a lot. The second game is also much harder than the first, healing you between battles is really a courtesy the game kindly allows you because you need it, it's not uncommon to get in the red or even die from common enemies if you have the wrong deck out. Which just means the bosses are correspondingly harder, of course; no guesses on how many times I died against a certain boss, though I'll say that my eyes popped out of my head when I saw their stats in the Field Guide (also a wonderful addition to the game). By the way, the 'Try Again' option is one of the best things go come out of the JRPG genre in some time, all games should have that option so that you don't have to sit through cutscenes again and again when trying to beat a particularly evil boss.
Music is also one of the few areas that wasn't improved upon in comparison to the first game. It's not to say that it's bad by any stretch of the imagination, just not as good as the phenomenal soundtrack of its predecessor. I liked most of the battle themes, but there just aren't as many in the prequel; it fits for all of the Afterling fights to have the same music (Poacher, which I really like) I guess, but more variety would have been nice. There were also too many low, militaristic brassy pieces, which makes sense in that you spend so much time on Alfard in this game, but they tend to run together after a while. And while I loved the use of electric guitar in the first one, Sakuraba goes way overboard with it in quite a few of the pieces. He seemed to use less restraint this time, which doesn't work out so well for some of the new themes--like Chaotic Dance 2, which I still like because it's Punk-Kid-Giacomo's theme, but Chaotic Dance is definitely better. That said, there are a few pieces from the second game that I actually like more. The Komo Mai theme (Heaven Sea Flower Temple vs. The Hall of All Creation) is one of them, which I thought had a rather overbearing violin in the original, and is performed much more delicately the second time around. I also like the main battle music, Valedictory Elegy more than True Mirror, which is ironic because the orchestral version of True Mirror is my absolute favorite piece of music from both games.
Not only is it a fantastic arrangement on its own merits, it's also the music for an amazing battle, my absolute favorite because of the immense emotional pay off it provides for someone who has played the first game. The setting, first of all, is very different from that of other boss battles in the game. Many battles happen at night or in dark places, but even those that happen during daytime have environments made up of blues, greens, browns, purples, darker colors, maybe with storm clouds rolling in overhead. Here though, the room is all shining gold (Standard Alfard design, but you've never fought in a place where it's been emphasized like this before) and the sky you can see through the windows behind the characters is the blue and white of a perfect, sunny day. Then the music kicks in, and you realize it's your theme. It's technically the main battle theme from the first game but it's what plays when you--the main character--fight, and furthermore, I believe the fight against Kalas has the guitar version of True Mirror as the music. The piece itself also played during the last Giacomo-Ayme-Folon fight so it's not solely 'your' theme, but it does highlight which battles are more important to the story. So the choice of music is already atypical, and when Baelheit attacks...you realize his specials are the spirit finishers from the first game, right down to the accompanying phrases.
When combined with the plot revelations dumped on you beforehand, the result is really something else. Daimon is basically you from the first game, and Baelheit is who Kalas almost was. In fact, though he had some pretty messed up views and went about implementing them in entirely the wrong way, Baelheit's motives were actually more noble than Kalas's, in that he didn't do what he did for entirely selfish reasons. And when Daimon stopped advising Baelheit because he had gone too far down the wrong path Baelheit still looked to Daimon for guidance though he couldn't hear her anymore, but Kalas actually went as far as to knock out and erase his guardian spirit's memories when they disagreed. And when combined with the game's statement that spiriters and their guardians have the power to sway the fate of the world...in the first game Kalas tried to override his spirit but was eventually helped by it to save the world after he had sense knocked back in to him, while in this one Baelheit did sway the fate of the world--by helping to turn it in to a world that needed saving in the first place.
Which brings me to the next subject, that even the writing is better in this game. It's not perfect of course and has a not insignificant number of cliches or ham-fisted portions, but the game is much more self-aware this time around and also has much improved dialogue that helps even minor NPCs feel much more alive. Combined with voice acting that is not only much better than the first one's (which isn't hard, granted) but actually good, and you get a game where it's much easier to feel for the characters. Not only did Rodolfo get actual development in this game, he's also one of the few characters where the accent is distinctly non-Japanese but (unlike One Piece's horrible dub) actually fits the character. I also want Lolo and the Sfida Attendant to get to gether and have a gaggle of mechanically inclined, obnoxiously perky kids :D. And how could I fail to mention that the main character's biological mother is actually named, and though she's still threatened to motivate the character she manages to make it to the end of the game alive and mostly intact! Amazing.
You get fewer party members in this game, but they all receive much more development in return, and all three felt essential to the plot in a way that some of the characters in the previous game didn't. Sagi is much more likeable than Kalas, and while I didn't dislike Kalas in the first game I felt much less like I was being an asshole in purpose by agreeing with Sagi so that I'd get better cards during battle. I'm very impressed by his characterization actually, he's not only not eternally emowangsty but also manages to pull himself out of the few times he was justified for feeling down, and is usually fairly good-natured without being teeth-grindingly cheerful or shounen heroish. Milly is also so much more awesome than Xelha--and as with Kalas though I also don't really mind Xelha's characterization it's nothing special, while with Milly instead of another typical mage-type mysterious girl linked to an ancient civilization character, you get a female character with the highest physical defense in the game and uses giant maces to beat people's faces in. And how could I forget Guillo? He's not only the actual mage-like party member, but also a thousand-year-old transexual puppet with a crush on Sagi who likes to make snarky comments about his love rivals and inappropriate animal analogies about everything else :D.
His interaction with Milly is awesome and hilarious, which just reminds me that another thing this game is better about is the humor. The sequence with the Lord of the Lava Caves made me laugh hard enough to put down my controller, but besides that also showcases another instance where Milly certainly isn't the typical RPG heroine, with her sleeping through classes and inelegant angry stomping. Though Sagi's voice acting is pretty good it doesn't match up to Guillo and Milly's, which are both excellent and just made their interaction even better. The minor characters also have more character and are more amusing this time around. The Diadem characters were the best I thought, seeing Ladekahn and Gibari as snot nosed brats was great--especially their last segment in the Cloud Passage--helped along by Palolo and kid!Gibari's awesome voice-acting (once again, so much improved over the first game). The letters were also a fantastic idea, I loved the junk mail and Tik's adventures in learning how to write--and on a more serious note, kid!Savyna's letters to you were certainly unsettling, and how weird but awesome is it that Guillo is who she modeled herself after?--but the best use of the letters was definitely Giacomo. His role this time around is as the villain who's always dogging your trail and whenever he catches up just never manages to quite beat you, a character type well known to JRPGs. The game is very aware of this though and plays it up for max hilarity with Giacomo's character design and dialogue, even having him send you petulant letters railing at your superiority after every battle, shouting 'I'll get you next time Sagi!!!11' and he's practically your penpal, it's awesome XD.
The characterization of the enemies also had something approaching nuance this time around (or at least compared to most videogames), which the first game tried for in some cases but didn't quite achieve. Opinions may vary but I thought the portrayal of Geldoblame was actually quite sympathetic--he originally truly did only want peace and security for everyone else, until he was stabbed in the back and abandoned by his hero. He was also aware of how the rest of the world might look dimly upon his relationship with Verus, which you can figure out by inspecting items just as in the first game. However, in contrast to the first game, I really didn't expect the game to actually explicitly spell it out at the end, and so give him a reason for being the way he is in the first game while at the same time putting the blame for that on Verus's actions and not on Geldoblame having 'deviant' urges in the first place, just his taking the wrong path in dealing with the betrayal. It did a lot to assuage my annoyance at homosexuality seemingly once again being a character trait only given to villains, I'll tell you that, even if some 'good' homosexual characters would have been even better. As in the last game, one member of the enemy Trio is much more developed than the other two--and how awesome is it that Valara's definitely the head of the group, not only the biggest damage dealer but also the highest ranking soldier of the three and the most important to the story--but the letters Heughes and Nasca send to each other flesh out their characters much more than what little development Ayme and Folon had at all, as does the option to let them go for the better ending, which still gets you some cheesy enemy-who-is-now-reluctantly-your-ally scenes, but they're much better justified this time around.
Then there's the reversal of Baelheit and Verus in their roles, a fairly common plot twist in videogames but done better here than in most, as it's actually hinted at throughout the game and becomes very obvious in retrospect, but the writers also don't mess up by making Verus too suspicious. I've already rambled endlessly on how much I love the fight with Baelheit and his part in the story, but when you find out that not only did Verus fake the guardian spirit but also his injuries, and that he's probably Sagi's dad with poor Gena (not explicitly stated but there if you want to find out, the game can sometimes be very ham-fisted about certain plot points but other times it's great at subtly giving you details about the story, Shanath being another example of this) and purposely had him selected for the experiments, Verus is really the only character in the game that comes off as entirely unsympathetic. Depending on if you fought Wiseman or not I suppose he could count too, but even he differs from Verus in his portrayal as merely otherworldly and alien in his thinking, while Verus's brand of evil is entirely Grade A human assholishness.
The plot is also better written and more interesting, in my opinion. Though I thought the game went overboard with the number of unbeatable battles, it was interesting playing a game where the main character lost so many times in the service of the plot instead of winning just because he's the main character. The overall story is also much more about politics and intrigue and how history is created than Chosen Ones and finding magical doodads to save the world. And I really love how just as the first game takes advantage of the interaction between player and game to create one of the few legitimate uses of amnesia in videogames in recent memory, the second game uses the knowledge players take from the first game to set up certain expectations only to methodically knock them all down. You go in thinking you're playing the part of a guardian spirit again, but you aren't and you eventually realize, as I mentioned before, that you play the enemy from the first game and the role of your enemy's guardian spirit actually matches your role in the first game much better, and the 'Chosen One' of this game is part of why the events of the first game are set in motion. I almost wish Baelheit actually had been the final boss because it would have been so fitting as the culmination of your experiences when both games are taken together, though Verus as the final boss does fit better for the game when taken alone.
I haven't talked about the origins of Malpercio yet, have I? God that was awesome, it was pretty well foreshadowed but still well hidden enough that it could come as a surprise if you weren't paying attention. I had occasionally entertained the idea but only started seriously considering it when the Dark Brethren told Seph 'one body is not enough' and I thought 'Wait a minute, didn't they say Malpercio was made from the parts of five gods in the first game?' And the Children of the Earth, mystical heroes from the first game helping you seal away an ancient evil, but in this game it was because of their mistake that the wrong people were taken down (whether it was right for Malpercio to resort to asking the Dark Brethren for power and to kill those people or not, the real troublemakers weren't them but Wiseman and the Dark Brethren), that the problem wasn't really solved, and that the idea of using the End Magnus and Malpercio's remains for evil purposes could have happened. It's a great twist that really plays on history and how it can be misunderstood and distorted. Also, it would have been awesome to get a fully animated opening like in the first game, but it's still great to sit down and watch it after beating the game and finally understand what's going on, and finally realize that you're seeing 'yourself'.
And oh man that ending (except for the silly 'Never let go!' part): Sagi and Milly as Melodia's parents (Okay, so crazy hair colors sometimes do serve a purpose), Milly in Melodia's future room presumably snarking back and forth with Guillo's head...it's sort of happy (until Geldoblame's last scene at least) in that all the party members make it out alive, even Guillo, but it's tempered by the knowledge of just what goes down in the first game and that the peace is only a temporary one. And it's something that's easily missed--I missed their hideout in the desert myself, actually--but the sidequest with Georg and Larikush sort of implies that Sagi and Milly (and Guillo XD) are also Kalas's parents in a sense, if the description I found for the final form of the heart flask is true. Just, grargh, it's sort of creepy and depressing but still very cool plotwise.
As a final note, I suppose Hassaleh in the first game is supposed to be like Mira in this one, there but not important to the story so the characters never actually visit it. I would have liked the game to be a little more explicit on that point, but at least they sort of gave it precedence by referring to Mira but never letting you see it during this game.
Anyone who liked the first one should buy and devour this game immediately. And even if you didn't like the first one the prequel is such a huge improvement over it that I'd recommend it on its own merits anyway as it can be played as a stand alone game (though you really get the most out of it from playing the first then Origins).
Yes, I really did write 3,681 words about a videogame. Uh, I really like it? Yeah ♥.
